


Leather & Secrets

by somekindofseizure



Category: The X-Files
Genre: Baseball, First Kisses, MSR, The Unnatural, prompts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-06-08
Updated: 2016-06-08
Packaged: 2018-07-13 21:02:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7136996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/somekindofseizure/pseuds/somekindofseizure





	Leather & Secrets

“Shut up, Mulder.  I’m playing baseball,” she says and the ball crackles like a thick sheet of ice, then melts into the dark.  Just a pop fly probably, but for her the sound is as satisfying as a home run.  He keeps his mouth shut, protecting her from the truth.  For once, he can do that.

Her body is limp in his arms as she lets him swing and sway her, the only kind of dancing he could possibly ever teach.  He concentrates on the innocence in her laugh to distract himself from the warm friction of her body against his jeans as he twists her hips.  This was your idea, he tells himself, don’t be a creep.

They hit the ball again and again, a few more cracks and then a whiff-clang against the gate.  She clucks her tongue and squirms loose, already spoiled by the crisp thwack of contact, and takes off her jacket.  Her black shirt is tight, reveals a thin sliver of belly, whiter than a baseball.  These are not things he usually studies about Scully – her clothes, the way they fit her – but his mind is under the temporary rule of the body part which has been pressed against her for the past five minutes.  He’s grateful she doesn’t turn around as she uncloaks herself.

“Getting in the way,” she says of the jacket as she backs once more into his arms.

He takes a deep breath; fresh-raked dirt, the clean chalkiness of the bat, animal hide oiled and soaked with palmly sweat.  But instead of pointing his nostrils up into the air to soak it up, he finds himself following the dab of perfume Scully has behind her ear.  Sweet, subtle, carefully applied.  He usually obeys when she tells him to shut up.  But rambling might be his only hope.

“It’s not horsehide anymore, you know…” he says as they swing.

“What?”

“The ball, you called it horsehide before.  They make them with cowhide now.”

“How come?” Swing.  Wind on his knuckles.

“I don’t know.  We’re just nicer to horses, I guess.  You don’t hear little girls saying ‘daddy buy me a cow,’ do you?   It’s ponies, always ponies.  Did you want a pony, Scully?”

“No.  I wanted a scalpel.”

He licks his bottom lip as her smile raises her cheek like a question mark into his face.  He tries to think of what else he knows about balls.  Whoever taught him to think about baseball to avoid arousal was a goddamn liar.  

“You know what’s inside the ball?”

“Cream.  Like a Cadbury egg.”  Here he is trying to sterilize the situation and she does this..

“A piece of cork, wound in yarn.”  

“Yarn?  Really?”

“Yes.  Like, a mile of yarn, actually.  Then rubber.  Then the leather.  And the stitches aren’t just for show.  That’s what makes the ball swerve, drop, curve.  The pitcher uses them to control the ball.”

Crack.  The angle of her hips deepens or maybe it’s his imagination; he squeezes the bat tight in anxiety.  But the extra torque in his hands makes him keenly aware of her fingers, wrapped in tandem with his around a hard phallic piece of wood.  

Crack.  No, he was right, she is bending more.  And the bat is moving slightly out of his control, as if they’re using a Ouija board.  He struggles to keep the front of his shoulders from enveloping her.

“Mulder…” she says gently. “Can I tell you a secret?”  This time when she swings, he can feel her shoulder blades engage through the thin material of her top, knashing like gears against his jersey.

“Hm?” His voice doesn’t manage not to crack even on this, the tiniest of words. Hers comes like a pitcher’s secret weapon - a cutter, seemingly speeding straight ahead, dropping down into his gut at the last moment.

“I know how to play baseball,” she says.  

This time, when the ball approaches, it’s hers.  He stays put, taking his turn as the passenger.  Crack.  

He chuckles in her ear, unable to peel himself away, though his initial purpose there is clearly unnecessary.  She moves like water under him, smooth and of its own accord, contained within his frame.  She swings, this time dropping it in the outfield.  

“Don’t I get to go to first base?” she asks cheerfully.

“If you want to.  Kind of hard to play that way with just two –“

She lifts her chin at the mound and shouts for the kid to go get the ball.  And as he hustles off in the opposite direction, she spins in place.  She catches Mulder’s neck in her hands before he has the chance to fully straighten up. Covers his mouth before he has the chance to stammer.  She is kissing him.  He is playing baseball and Scully is kissing him, he thinks.  The skin of her full upper lip is raw and chapped, perversely inspires him to suck it as his eyelashes flutter to resist the suction of a powerful inhale.   

If his fifteen year old self could only see him now, he thinks, kissing a beautiful girl on a baseball field.  And just like a teenager, he fears his own hands, keeps them at bay - one at his side, the other pushing the heel of the bat toward the dirt.  Her body presses gently against him.  She is soft everywhere he’s hard.

And when he finally caves to the will of his hands and lifts one to her waist, she glides his neck away from her face.  He can see the boy jogging back toward the mound out the corner of his eye.  She looks down at his hand on the bat and covers it with her own, her fingers falling in the spaces between his.

“What was that?” he asks, rubbing his lips with awed fingers.  She smiles and looks up, chin still dipped.  There’s an ‘of course’ in her voice.

“First base.”  


End file.
